Prophet Ibraheem (AS) - 05 - Ismaeel (AS) and the Zamzam

For this part of the story, we read pages 37 to the top of page 40 in the Migo & Ali book - covering when Prophet Ibraheem (AS) left his wife and baby son in the desert and how the well of zamzam water was found. Again, this was something they were already a little familiar with through previous work, stories and discussions to do with Hajj and Umrah - but to keep with the chronological order of the topic I felt there was no harm in revisiting it.

To recap what happened, we made a simple pop-up craft using A4 card. I prepared the pieces in advance: a horizontal piece of yellow A4 card with a 75mm tall strip glued at the edges a little up from the bottom, the outline of a fountain (about 50mm tall) cut out from blue card, the outlines of hills cut out from brown paper, 2 coloured lolly sticks (I didn't have blue or would have used those!). If your children are more artistically inclined than mine, you may like to let them create these parts themselves!

On the first day, the twins painted the bottom part of the card as well as the strip going across brown (cue revision of which colours from our paints mixed to make brown and demonstration of how changing the ratio of red/yellow/green changes the hue - though by the time they were done it was all one shade of brown anyway 😂) - to represent the desert sand. I would have liked to use sandpaper or craft sand, but we didn't have any to hand so insha'Allah next time! They also coloured in the zamzam water using blue glitter glue pens. We talked about what happened in the story as they worked, then left everything to dry overnight.

The next day, they glued the hills down (recap what Prophet Ibraheem's wife had to do and why, so where did they think they should place the hills on their paper?) and sellotaped the zamzam water to the top of the lolly stick.

Asked them to tell me where the zamzam spring came from and how - then I showed them how to thread the lolly stick under the strip going across so it could move up and down. I then helped them put a strip of sellotape either side of the lolly stick at the bottom of the strip of card, so the stick wouldn't move side to side.

Finally, I asked them what the two hills were called and the twins labelled them with their names.